Drivers for international innovation activities in developed and emerging countries

Contents:

This paper aims to shed light on firm specific drivers that lead firms to internationalise their innovation activities. The paper draws a comprehensive picture of driving forces by including firm capabilities, characteristics of the firm’s competitive environment and the influence of innovation obstacles in the home country. In particular, the role of the potential driving forces is tested on the probability to carry out different innovative activities abroad (R&D, design/conception of new products, manufacturing of innovative products and implementation of new processes). In a second step these driving forces are used to observe their impact on the decision to locate innovation activities in various countries and regions (China, Eastern Europe, Western Europe and North America) as well as in groups of countries with similar levels of knowledge (country clubs). The analysis is based on the Mannheim Innovation Panel survey which represents the German CIS (Community Innovation Survey) contribution. Two survey waves are combined and result in a sample of about 1400 firms. The results show that the decision to perform innovation activities abroad is mainly driven by organisational capabilities such as absorptive capacities, international experience and existing technological competences of the respective firm. Innovation barriers at the German home base such as lack of labour and high innovation costs foster the set up of later-stage innovation activities abroad while the lack of demand demonstrates a barrier to the internationalisation decision for the development and manufacturing of new products. Location decisions receive the strongest influencing effects from the international experience of the firm. Firms which innovate in developing countries seem to require a more extensive level of international experience by international R&D cooperation.

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:zewdip:09064. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (ZBW - German National Library of Economics)

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.